Family Harmony

        Getting together with family members one hasn't seen for awhile can be a happy time.  Then again, family reunions may not always go as smoothly as we wish.  Maintaining harmony may take some extra effort on our part.  It may require nothing less than Christlike love.

        For the follower of Christ Jesus, loving other people is not something we can choose to do only when we feel like it.  The Master expected his followers to express the divine nature day in and day out.  Jesus taught, "Blessed are the peacemakers:  for they shall be called the children of God."  (Matthew 5:9)  It is our divine right to experience peace; it is also important that we make  peace.  We can do both successfully as we strive to replace the mortal picture of man--the false view--with the spiritual, perfect concept of man that Jesus came to declare.

        The Bible teaches the sure way to realize harmony within the family unit and in all our relationships.  It reveals in the very first chapter the fact that God made man in His own image and that He pronounced all that He created to be very good.  There's no better starting point for placing family relationships on a firm basis.

        It is a belief in many minds, in conflicting personal egos, that causes trouble among family members.  But because there's just one infinite God, the source of all intelligence and wisdom, there's really only one Mind; and man, as the spritiual image and likeness of God, reflects this one divine Mind.  When we acknowledge and realize, in prayer, that the divine Mind alone is governing all concerned and  holding them in love, hostility is defused.  Peace comes, not on the shaky basis of mere human agreemnt or appeasement but through the understanding that God's law of  harmony is in operation. 

        We can help promote healing by realizing that the traits causing conflict are no part of anyone's genuine, God-created selfhood.  Empowered with the Christly, correct view of man, we can recognize inharmony as illegitimate and keep it out of family relationships.

        Mary Baker Eddy writes in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures:  "Let Christian Science, instead of corporeal sense, support your understanding of being, and this understanding will supplant error with Truth, replace mortality with immortality, and silence discord with harmony."
(page 495)